Handling Typos Using Fuzzy Matching

• Event: TechX Series
• Organiser: Indian Statistical Institute Tech Club (ISITC)
• Venue: Second Floor Auditorium, Academic Building, ISI Bengaluru
• Date: 31 January, 2026
• Abstract: We have all been there: looking for a specific file but not remembering its exact name, recalling only fragments, or perhaps misspelling the search term. How do our systems retrieve the right files despite these errors? How do computers guess the “closest” words to what you intended to say?
  Note: It’s not always AI.
  This talk explores the common techniques and algorithms behind approximate string matching (also known as fuzzy matching). We will move from rigid exact matching to flexible metrics like Levenshtein distance and N-grams. There are no explicit pre-requisites, apart from an informal understanding of algorithms and time complexity.